Nissan Will Only Make A Nismo That's "Really Good”

Last weekend marked the final round of Formula E’s 10th season. At an FIA world championship event that has struggled to find its identity in an increasingly saturated motorsports market, Car Throttle sat down with two key members of Nissan’s leadership team to investigate how the brand can carve out its identity in an increasingly electrified automotive future.

Formula E Team Principal Tommaso Volpe stands at the helm of Nismo’s premier international motorsport team while the brand’s newly promoted Chief Planning Officer, Ivan Espinosa, brings over 20 years of experience within the company to his new role. 

On the topic of the Nismo performance brand’s return to Europe with the Ariya Nismo, Espinosa was keen to point towards his hesitancy to devalue the badge. In response to a question on why it took so long for the Nismo name to once again venture into Europe, he said: 

“One of the difficult parts of my job is prioritising what we do. And, the good thing of my job is I have many, many bright people. I have many, many bright ideas. The difficult part of my job is prioritising, all of them because we have a limited amount of resources to play with, you know?

“And I also don't like to bring cars that are not going to satisfy the needs of the customers. I’d rather wait a little bit and make something that is really good and credible, particularly as a Nismo. Yeah, something that is really good, credible that people can really enjoy and see a value in, than pushing and running and doing some half-baked things. This is the main reason you can spend a good amount of time to make things right.”

That’s all well and good, but such optimism and excitement about the project comes in stark juxtaposition to the reality of the Nismo Ariya’s reception (Exhibit A being the comments on our instagram post covering the release last week). 

For many a CT reader (and writer), the legacies of Nissan and Nismo mean far more than a fast, heavy, and touchscreen-dominated SUV can ever hope to embody. Customisation, modification, and above all else supercar-killing speed were what made the Nissans of old such timeless cult classics. Well, that and Brian O’Connor…

That customisation though, may instead be limited to EV remapping and VR in Nissan’s next era, as Espinosa explained:

“On one end we could we could do some level of customization just with our Nismo arm, and making some sort of ‘packages’ available for customers that through software you can buy and get some different tuning… There are also interesting things that we could bridge by using autonomous technology.”

There is, of course, a larger shift at play in the automotive world as many brands move towards fully electrified lineups but with some readjusting their sales targets among weak consumer demand, just how Nismo fits the next chapter of the Nissan story remains to be seen. What value the badge retains will depend entirely on how earnestly Nissan treats the work of those from which they have inherited that legacy.